Dhamma, the novel

By Jonah Rye

After the genocide. The environment is heavy with the memory of conflict, rank with the spoils of aid and corruption, infused with exploitation, violence, impunity. Dhamma, the triptych.

-- When the girl was still very young two boys came. They selected her. There is a place where you will make a great deal of money they told her. And you won't pick up garbage. Here there is danger, but with us you are safe. -- ANGELS, a girl taken and trafficked, and the trio of misbegotten believers who make her redemption their duty. -- Girls talked about getting money, pay the debt. Get out. Freedom. But I knew. They knew. No getting out. The debt never goes away. --

Set in the razing of the rainforest, PIRATES, a tale of ecoterror.
-- Hornets. Black, armored, lurk above, pace the convoy. Soldier shadows, M16s at ready, wait grim in the open ports. In command chopper, shadow mounts heavy machine gun, barrel tipped earthward. Stinger and Hellfire hang primed. Wait . . . Live rightly. Fly headlong. Never any need to tell the other rangers or the police. No need to go to the army. Nothing to be done. It was understood. And now he hoped against all that he knew, that they - police, army, authority - would desist, not retaliate, not turn on him. He could go home, to his baby son, to his daughter grown to girlhood without him, precious daughter who needed him for her to grow up safe, to grow up free, fulfilled. To his wife, young, and beautiful as her children. All of them vulnerable. Prey. He hoped, he prayed. Flew forward, flew away. --

And PASSAGE, the story of a country girl in her quest for a better life in the city.
-- Two hundred . . . stood breathless in the rain. Someone choked. Someone cried. Someone said, 'They're illegal.' --

Dhamma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonah Rye
• Release date: Jun 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463036822

Jonah Rye

Jonah Rye is the author of Dhamma, the novel, and Good-Bye, Audrey. He writes from Southeast Asia and the US west coast.

Book preview

Dhamma, the novel

–––

After The Genocide

–––

Jonah Rye

Dhamma, the novel – After The Genocide © 2018 Jonah Rye

Originally published as Dhamma, the novel © 2013 Jonah Rye

Cover photo and design by the author

Smashwords Edition

For TG –

teacher, scholar, democrat, friend –

and for Reaksmey

Contents

PRELUDE

Dhamma

Karma

Prayers of the Faithful

Rule of Law

ANGELS

Girl

Impunity

Traitors

Gehenna

Angels

Angel

PIRATES

Year Of Misfortune

Pirates

PASSAGE

Elegy – Tourism

Passage

Excellency

Illegal

POSTLUDE

Coconuts

PRELUDE

Dhamma

Farmers, they have no land, no work. They come to this field in the city to become a camp of squatters, dark desperate, a nuisance.

They come to the city, their capital carved out of the jungle, jungle that turns back relentless, eternal, reclaiming the land, pushing up banana trees and weeds taller than people in a few weeks. City of patchwork rooftops, blue and green and striped plastic, rusty corrugated metal, gold and red ceramic tile, of bitter smoke from a million cook fires meandering up to mingle with the exhaust of cars and trucks and factories and a million motorbikes and casting a doleful haze over everything. Of pagodas in a style older than the five hundred year city, gold-tiled rooftops dusky with smoke and time, and, at the peaks, long curved wooden tendrils, long curved fingers of dancers, of angels, curving in an arc to Heaven.

It is their first time in the city and they gather before the pagoda, the temple of their Lord Buddha. They sleep in the shadow of the palace of their revered king, and wait across from the National Assembly to raise their voice. They trust in the Buddha, in their king, in their government.

Across from the National Assembly, they camp. They have heard that the Assembly is for the people, its deputies serve them. But they misunderstood. The National Assembly serves the Strong Man, the deputies are his lackeys. The Strong Man cuts the pie and takes the first slice, the biggest slice. Then the ministers and the generals take theirs. And the members of Parliament, the National Assembly and Senate, protectors of the people, take what’s left. But it is never enough. So the ministers and generals and members of Parliament dupe the people out of their land in return for casinos and resorts, vanished jungle and field, and landless farmers.

Disinherited, the people gather into a little village, fifty meters by fifty meters, of hammocks and cook fires and plastic sheeting. They cook rice and greens, a few pieces of meat or fish when they can, over fires fueled by twigs and dry grass and plastic bottles. The women gather around a hose every day to wash themselves, through kramas fully expanded to cover their bodies. They wash their clothes at the same time, spread disembodied shirts skirts and pants on the grass and bushes to dry. A little kid stands by to watch. The men wait and smoke. A fountain, decorated with a crumbling concrete tableau – concrete little boys, all in a circle, pissing on concrete little girl mermaids bobbing in the water – stands at the edge of the camp. Kids swim in the fountain, a pool of brown stagnant murk knee-deep, full of floating and sunken debris.

Then they are gone.

Young men come to live in the pagoda. They come for learning so one day they can get a good job. They come for a place to stay in the city and meals to eat. They come to discern the way of the Buddha and to serve him. The Pagoda Boys serve the Strong Man.

Early, when the morning sun dabbed the sky pink, when city people were beginning their exercises at the river, the Pagoda Boys stampeded out of the temple. Flailing clubs and mattocks, they attacked the camp and cut down their country men and women. In their fury, they trampled to death an old pleading couple and a little girl and boy running stumbling away too slow. They broke the back of a young mother, left her with her babies crying in the dirt. The police came with dogs and clubs to herd the people, hurt, bleeding, terrified, onto trucks. They took them away from the city, crowded and crammed and stacked them tight together in trucks to be resettled, away from their city.

Monks standing in the doorway of the pagoda, seeing the people turned out and set upon, laughed.

The place is clear now, banana trees and exotic weeds pushing back up, reclaiming the land. Cleaners in green coats sweep grass and dirt, stoke a few refuse fires. You would hardly know that a village had been here. A group of people, gathered together, desperate but hopeful that their Lord Buddha would hear their supplications. That their temporal masters, their king and their representatives who are, after all, by their indifference, their negligence, their collusion and greed, responsible for their condition, might notice. Gone, but something lingers, a feeling, or spirit. Ghosts in a land of ghosts.

Something in the air, ghosts of the living, their cries, their pleas, mingle with the cries and pleas of other ghosts, ghosts of a time not long ago, dark, long night of this lifetime.

~~

Down the street from the pagoda, Dee lived with her mother and younger brother and her girl cousin – her sister. Her father was dead, but he’d left this home for them. Downstairs, where they lived, was simple concrete and tile. They slept on thin mats on hard wooden platforms and ate sitting on the floor around a low table. Upstairs was a special place, a place apart. A bedroom and a little sitting room, all of it – walls floors ceiling and furnishings – of hardwood golden bright. At the top of the stairs, at the entry into this special place, stood a gleaming teak shrine to the Lord Buddha. They came up here to clean every day and to tend the shrine, offer fruit and send prayers up with the smoke of incense to their Lord Buddha. Otherwise it lay unoccupied, undisturbed. All upstairs was a shrine, an exotic dwelling, unspoiled, different and apart, reserved for some future visitor or event.

Dee and her mother had a small café across the street, where her brother and sister helped. Dee was growing up, becoming a woman, still a girl but, at thirteen, old enough to drop out of school – what more did a girl need to learn? what does a girl do in school after age ten anyway, but write love letters to boys? – to help her mother at home and in the café and to learn the skills she would need to serve her husband.

There was a man who lived in the pagoda. His homeland was far away near the border. Heng met Dee at her little restaurant and came every day. Sometimes, in the quiet of early afternoon, when people slept through the hottest part of the day, Dee and Heng walked past the National Assembly to the river and sat on the bank. At first, they sat close, his arm around her shoulder, her hand up to keep his hand at bay, keep it from falling onto her small budding flowers. Soon, though, they argued and he was cruel. He held her, restrained her to keep her from walking away, twisted her arm until she cried. Heng possessed her.

With regular employment scarce, Heng did little jobs at the pagoda and sometimes worked, with mattock and dirt basket, out in the community. And he joined a group of men at the pagoda, the Red Kadres, to learn and carry out the teachings of First Brother. He wore black clothes, a red krama around his neck. With his comrades he decried the American war and condemned the prime minister as an American puppet. He even denounced the king as a playboy and fraud, a traitor. One day, he and his comrades stopped a young boy stealing a chicken. They battered the boy, knocked him to the ground, pummeled and stomped and kicked him, and he lay still. The boy died there on the street in the shadow of the pagoda.

Two monks standing in the entryway of the pagoda watched and laughed with their hands at their mouths.

Heng’s disagreements with Dee increased. Her mother, shocked at his loud betrayals of the king, forbade Dee to see him, but in a family without a father it was difficult to impose discipline. Dee, though, had wearied of Heng’s violence, his cruelty. She knew he visited brothels, even grabbed girls off the street, always with his comrades, knew they often took one girl together, for hours, passing her between them, assaulting her as a gang.

–I must talk to you Heng. At the river.

–No, soon I go back to the pagoda. A meeting. We’ll go to your house.

–My brother and sister are asleep.

–It’s OK. We’ll go upstairs.

–Alright, but just for a minute.

At midday the nation slumbers. The house was drowsy with the sleep of brother and sister. Mother lay asleep at the café. When they got upstairs, Dee led the way to the big heavy polished hardwood chairs in the sitting room. Passing the gleaming shrine to the Lord Buddha, she brought her hands together at her forehead, prayerful, and bowed.

–We go in there, he said.

–No, this is alright.

He shoved her into the bedroom, pushed her down onto the bed, laid on her, her hands seized in one of his. She opened her mouth, and his hand clasped her throat.

–I’ll kill you. Don’t say no to me. Your stupid colonial ideas. I’ll kill you. He took his hand away. Her body exposed, her shame, she would not call out and be found like this. She tried to move away, turn from him, but he held her locked tight in his grip. He pushed her pants down, forced her legs apart. A wild cat, he rammed into her, stabbed into her, fast! and bounded from her. Finished!

She lay still, eyes closed.

They were married in the house of her rape one month later. His comrades were there. The laughing monks, solemn, chanted and sprinkled lotus petals.

As she started to grow the baby, he left and she knew she would not see him again. She bore a son.

Sometimes his comrades in black, red kramas around their necks, came to the restaurant to eat. Leering and laughing, they made her sit with them.

As the New Year approached, only days away, and the American war, and the Liberation, the prime minister fled to the beautiful land of Hawaii where he would live out his days in the moderate climate of the jewel of the Pacific, with a nice breeze. The king, leaving behind a wife in every province, moved to his palaces in North Korea. Or China.

The gang of men in black left the pagoda. They returned in the New Year with mattocks, clubs and long knives, with rifles and pistols. They stormed the pagoda and drove the monks, sore afraid, out. They told the vendors across from the pagoda to leave, pack quickly and go – the Americans were coming to bomb the city. They told Dee’s mother she must take the children and leave immediately. Dee and the baby would go with them. There was a place for her.

There was a place, a school, in the southern part of the city. Education and religion, manifestations of Western decadence, were not necessary in the New Era, so this school had been transfigured. It had become a prison to which enemies of the Organization were sent. Men, women. Tortured till they confessed, and killed. Children, babies. Enemies.

This prison today is one of the most popular tourist sites in the country. Transfigured again, a museum now, it has retained within it an eerie stillness after misery and death. The weapons of torture, manacles chained to walls, water tanks, pliers and pincers, electric cables, remain. A wall map of the country, its space filled in with dozens of authentic skulls, hangs in the gift shop. In one room, hundreds of photos, mug shots of the dead, cover the walls, floor to ceiling. Enemies in black, with swollen eyes and jaws, stare out in wonder. Names are affixed to most. There is a photo of a girl, fourteen or fifteen, with the name Dee. A document in the archives – they recorded everything, meticulously, copiously – explains that the Kadres bound Dee and hung her by her ankles, plunged her head-first into a tank of water and held her there, pulled her out and plunged her in again, and she confessed to the crime of subverting the Organization. So they put her to death. And her baby son. Short on bullets, Dee’s executioners killed her with blows to her head and neck from a mattock. They swung her little boy by his feet and smashed his skull against a tree.

The pagoda is open again. Young men live there with the monks. One night a while ago, just outside the pagoda, a boy snatched a phone from a teenage girl. The girl sent up a long droning yowl that brought her boyfriend and the Pagoda Boys. They beat the boy, beat him to death, dragged him up onto the grass of the park and left him.

The monks watching, laughed.

~~

Huddled hushed in the corner, the girls sat together, three brown little nuts with black shining hair, dressed in their good clothes, white blouses and knee-length white skirts. They watched their mother, studied the most beautiful woman ever, far more beautiful than the pale actresses they saw on the posters at the cinema.

Her hair had the same sheen, her skin the same rich nut brown of her daughters. She knelt at the low table, bowed eyes down, on her knees, before her husband, quick wiry stiff strutting rooster. She always sat like this before her rooster, just as her neighbors did before theirs. Her place was not to comment, certainly not to suggest or question, hers not to ask, what about us? The rooster, in the family, in the polity, lectured and commanded. He decreed. She complied.

In a register high, halting, anxious, he crowed. He was doing OK at the ministry, by local standards. This was karma. Still, he needed more. He wanted a say, a voice. To have a voice, you needed resources. You had to pay. He had an opportunity to go to America to study, to get a degree that was really worth something. He had an opportunity to make a name, make a fortune, in the richest country in the world. This too was karma. And he would do it. But of course he had to go alone. They didn’t have the funds for all of them to go. And the girls needed their mother.

The younger girls heard little of this, sitting still and hushed, watching their mother who was, for the first time ever, grave. But the oldest, barely nine, heard and saw. She knew. Something terrible was unfolding. Her friends and friends of her mother and father, people she’d known as long as she could remember, had already packed and gone to the neighboring kingdom, or to the West. She understood they would never come back. And she heard the thunder every night. Thunder, but no rain. Her friends had told her it was the thunder of big guns and bombs, of war – the Americans and the Communists were coming from where the sun came up. Girls she had known all her life, girls she had seen and hugged every day, were gone, overnight, their only good-byes quick confused glances and shrugs. And now her father. Why couldn’t they go, too?

Of course, you see how dangerous it is here, for me. I have a way out. I will get to America. Once I’m gone, it’ll be fine. I’ll send money, when I get some. I’ve got to get out before the New Year. Something is going to happen.

On her knees, the woman bowed before him.

This trouble will pass. The Americans will get the government back on its feet. They have an interest. They will stay and help us. But there is all this trouble from the Communists. It isn’t safe, for me. You and the girls will be fine. It is because of my connections, my work. No problem for you.

Never had she seen her mother so grave. Every word fell against her like a blow. And the girl, too, was grave. Her little sisters watched and, seeing fear in the gravity, harbored their own fear.

I’ll get there and send for you. You’ll be fine. You have money to go to your homeland. The New Year is coming. You and the girls can enjoy with your parents. It will be very difficult for me, traveling to the border, being away at the New Year. But I will be OK. No problem for you.

In his strutting and orating, he did not notice a single tear fall, did not see a tiny glistening pearl form, fall, break on the low table. But they saw. Each one saw and each knew fear, each felt the cold stroke of loneliness.

For two hours the rooster crowed and strutted, rived the heart of his woman. The cock assails a hen, rives her splayed in the dirt and, shaking the dust from his feathers, struts away, leaves her stunned and dismayed, in the dirt.

He wore the clothes of a farmer, something they had never seen on the man who expected to be called Excellency, his head and neck neatly cowled in a stiff new red krama. Excellency as peasant. He nodded to the girls, turned stiffly and strutted to the door.

He flung the door open, thrust his feet into shoes and stepped off the concrete stoop, clicking on the flagstones to a dusty Japanese car where two more excellencies and their driver waited. The engine muttered, exhaust sputtering and dripping from the tailpipe, and they drove off. But the girls did not see. They huddled in their corner with their fear and watched the most beautiful woman ever, kneeling head down at the low table.

She turned, held out her arms to them, and they went to her. She enfolded the little ones in her embrace.

The oldest stood above them, her arms on mother’s shoulders. For weeks she’d heard firecrackers. New Year coming. And thunder. Thunder from where the sun came up. It was the eve of the New Era, the dawn of the long night.

Liberation. Two days later, the Kadres came. Poor rice farmers in black, red kramas around their necks, and armed with rifles and pistols, with cudgels mattocks and long knives, ordered the people out of their homes. Mother hesitated, tried to explain to a boy not much older than the girl. He swung a long gun at her, pointed it at her chest and snarled, wild cat spitting commands. She cringed, bowed her head and averted her eyes. She gathered her little girls, enfolded them in her embrace and, head down, left the house. The oldest carried two cloth bags and walked behind. They went out to the street, already crowded with people on the move. From their home, from their city, they walked with everybody else. Kadres in black, armed with Soviet, Chinese and American guns, posted along the edges of the human stream.

Already in the neighboring kingdom, the rooster was celebrating a more traditional New Year. He went on to make a new life, a good life, in America untroubled by events in his own country. He sent nothing to his family, nor did he send for them. After the fall of the capital, the country closed. He never heard from his wife and daughters. Dismissed them from memory. He turned from them, consigned them to the great wheel of the Dhamma, the way it is.

The human stream flowed into a river of people making their way out of the city, the capital of their thousand-year kingdom. Walking away from homes and villages where they had lived forever, the people became a great migration. Walking into the dark, into the long night of hate. And the world turned.

Karma

The Buddha never laughs. He doesn’t sprawl. He isn’t fat. In a land where the people are hungry, he is upright, austere, and dead serious. He sits, tall and erect, as he did the night he battled the armies, millions